Argento

Cristina Piffer

Rolf Art | Buenos Aires, Argentina
Curator: Fernando Davis

16.08.2018 - 12.10.2018

Press release

Argento l Fernando Davis

The work of the artist Cristina Piffer gathered in the exhibition Argento articulates and puts into operation two main poetic and political strategies. On the one hand, Piffer uses a set of printing, transfer and photographic registration procedures in which the image operates as a trace, inscription or engraved mark. On the other hand, it uses organic materials such as fat, meat and dehydrated blood which is sealed in acrylic and polyester resin tiles or on aseptic shelves and steel countertops. Devices that operate by containing and repressing the overflows and imbalances of the flesh, technologies of discipline and correction of bodies, rationalized and systematic instrumentalization of violence.

From these simultaneous strategies, Piffer’s work questions Argentina’s political history since the end of the 19th century. She extracts from the conflictual thickness of its plot images and texts silenced or marginalized by the discourses of the official history, to question the authoritarian tracings of their normalized journeys, with the out-of-registration of the bodies and subjectivities expelled or erased from those narratives. Violence returns, as Marcelo Pacheco points out, “as word and act in Argentine history, from its formation as a State and as a Nation”.

In 41 million hectares (2010), the numerical data recorded by the artist on blood powder refers to the number of Patagonian hectares expropriated from the indigenous peoples savagely massacred during the so-called “Desert Campaign”, a military campaign started in 1878 under the command of General Julio Argentino Roca. The indigenous genocide and the expropriation of their lands, later distributed to a handful of families of the Creole landowning bourgeoisie, constitutes the founding episode of a Nation project focused on the consolidation of a liberal oligarchic state and the development of an agricultural exportation economic model.

In Inventory (2018), Piffer transcribes with fat using the technic of serigraphy on paper, data taken from the registry of indigenous human remains that integrate the Catalogue of the Anthropological Section of La Plata Museum, compiled in 1911 by the German physician and ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche. The Mapuche lonko Inacayal, one of the last indigenous chiefs to resist Roca’smilitary advance on Patagonia, was taken prisoner in 1885 by the Army and later assigned, along with eleven other people, to the Museum of La Plata, by management of his first director, the expert Francisco P. Moreno. There, they were locked up and forced to work as ordinances and pawns. After his death in 1887, the body of Inacayal was dissected and exhibited in the museum.

Archives constitutes a crucial dimension in Piffer’s work. The Photographic Archive of the Museum of La Plata also serves as a source for the artist in the Argento series, Braceros (2018), in which indigenous portraits are revealed on glass plates, using a photographic technique, the wet collodion, used in the second half of the 19th century. Throbbing files: the text suspended in the delayed readability of white-on-white fat on paper. The stain that is spilled on the clear form of the archival text and blurs the disciplinary productivity of their orders of authority. The anthropological portrait as a presence-absence, also in suspense, as a disembodied, weightless, spectral image, sensitized in silver nitrate on the surface of the glass. Dormant state of the repressed, of what strives to become visible, of what calls our gaze and claims to be named.

In the installation Argento. 300 Acts (2017), Piffer bases her work from the archives of the Archbishopric of Buenos Aires, of the first three hundred baptisms performed on indigenous people held as prisoners on Martin Garcia Island, whose texts are transferred to metal sheets, by means of the draft material. Since the end of the 19th century, Martín García Island functioned as a concentration camp, biopolitical discipline and physical exploitation of the indigenous people. The researchers Mariano Nagy and Alexis Papazian analyze the continuity between “the practices of control and exploitation on the island, with the practices of distribution and use outside it.” From a State policy that promoted the systematic distribution of “available bodies”, the indigenous prisoners, converted into slave labourers, were destined to productive activities, domestic service or incorporated into the army and the navy.

Piffer’s work delves into folds and sedimentation of history, interrogates its repressed dormant states, its contemporary reverberations. The past does not constitute a closed and definitive instance, but, on the contrary, a territory open to the conflictual chance of a present where the battle for its interpretation is waged. For the artist it means, in this sense, to return to these buried pasts, in their traumatic cancellations and in their persistent returns, to question the discontinuous marks of their remains and erasures to make them pulsate politically and influence our present.